The Stupidity of Crowds?

Alan Patrick of Broadstuff.com has a post about how the Wisdom of Crowds isn’t the wisdom of crowds at all, citing the 0.9%, 9%, 90% rule, wherein 0.9% of user generated content is composed of creators, 9% commentators, and 90% consumers (carry the remaining 0.1%?). This means that all the content you read on Wikipedia, Amazon.com and IMDB (to use his examples) is written by the same 0.9% of the population, which means we aren’t tapping the Wisdom of Crowds per se, but of small (probably vocal) minorities.

He deals with our first rebuttal as a reply to comments, in that this wasn’t how the Wisdom of Crowds was supposed to work. Surowiecki specified that ideas should be independently made, drawn from different sources, and then aggregated. Patrick admits, however, that this does not happen with the user generated content sites we find today.

First of all, let us remember that around 1.7 billion people worldwide are using the Internet. Even if we only count North America, it’s 252 million. 0.9% of this is 2.2 million people, who are the so-called creators. 2.2 million people seems like more than enough to draw on different sources. Unfortunately for ideas being independently made, we have to trust the users, in a sense. We don’t have the (legal) means to ensure that people aren’t copying ideas from public content. On the other hand, that’s how opinions have been made since the beginning of time: One scours the information available and draws their own conclusions. In terms of aggregation, we are also at the beginning stages. Wikipedia does a good job of it, while Amazon allows you to see the overall number of stars, and Tripadvisor and IMDB rank hotels and movies based on the aggregate opinions. Much can still be done, but we’re on the right track.

We do disagree with Patrick’s idea to deal with the inefficiency. He seems to be drawing from the pages of Nudge when he suggests that users lose credibility (or clout) the more they comment or contribute. While this would be good for weeding out people with too much time on their hands and an axe to grind, it also leaves out field experts who may genuinely want to contribute to the common good. Who decides how much writing is too much? Besides, we will always have vocal people who are quick to complain with ridiculous comments (just watch CSPAN).

If pressed for a way to increase efficiency, we would suggest centrally located registration services (similar options have been tried before) that work for user generated content sites, such as Wikipedia, Epinions, Tripadvisor, Amazon, IMDB, etc. etc. These, however, will have peoples’ real information, which therefore means they must stand by what they say. It also means that if someone is too ridiculous, his comments can be ignored in one fell swoop.

In conclusion, we think this would make the service better, but we do not see it as a grave problem. If you want proof, how many readers here get by without ever using Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, Epinions, Tripadvisor, Etsy.com, Zilok.com, Yahoo Answers, Wikitravel, or any other user generated content site? Thought so.